The latest skullduggery in the SF mayor’s race has Google search results for Mark Farrell that make it look like prominent local publications ran headlines declaring “Don’t Trust Mark Farrell.” But the headlines are fake, and the Lurie campaign appears to be paying Google to manipulate them.

If you do any Google searching on SF mayoral candidate Mark Farrell, you might see some shocking headlines. For instance, you may see a search result for a San Francisco Chronicle article that appears to have the headline “Mark Farrell Ethics Violation - Don’t Trust Mark Farrell.” Or you may see a result pointing to an SF Standard article with the blunt headline “Don’t Trust Mark Farrell.”

This is curious, because neither the Chronicle nor the SF Standard has ever published any articles with the headline “Don’t Trust Mark Farrell,” nor any of the words that Google makes it look like these articles say. These are links to real articles published in the SF Standard and Chronicle, but Google allows political campaigns (in this case, the Daniel Lurie for Mayor campaign) to replace headlines and preview text in the search results, to make it appear as if respected publications are declaring “Don’t Trust Mark Farrell.”

Above we see a Google search result indicating that a Chronicle article was published with the headline “Mark Farrell Ethics Violation - Don’t Trust Mark Farrell.” That result does link to a legitimate Chronicle piece published on August 16, but one with the entirely different headline “Mark Farrell says you can trust his campaign finances. A surprise trip to his office left me wondering.” That piece is actually an op-ed by Chronicle columnist Emily Hoeven, but has some dynamite investigative reporting nuggets that are unflattering toward the Farrell campaign, to be sure.

But nowhere in that article do we see the words “Don’t Trust Mark Farrell,” as portrayed in the Google search result.

The same goes for the search results displaying for this SF Standard article, which Google would have you believe comes with the headline “Don’t Trust Mark Farrell.” It links to a July 1 article by the SF Standard’s Josh Koehn that is actually entitled “Mark Farrell lived large on campaign cash while mayor, supervisor.” That article too is full of some terrific reporting on Farrell's previous use of slush funds and legal loopholes. But the article certainly does not contain the words “Farrell caught spending thousands of dollars in campaign donations on luxury dining,” as the Google search display would indicate.

These ads do display the word “Sponsored,” and in some cases, also display the words “Paid for by Daniel Lurie for Mayor 2024.” But the ads misleadingly alter what we in the online news industry call “metadata,” that is, the headline and preview text snippet that displays on a given online platform.

Farrell’s campaign is running Google ads too, but they simply link to his own website, and are not really misleading. The Google ad transparency tool shows that Lurie, Farrell, and mayoral candidate Supervisor Aaron Peskin are all advertising on Google (we did not see Google ad campaigns for Mayor Breed or Supervisor Ahsha Safai). But Peskin and Farrell are both just running positive ads that link to their own campaign websites, not attack ads with misleading headlines.

In a statement to SFist, Lurie campaign consultant Tyler Law said, “Insider corruption has held San Francisco back from tackling our public safety, drug and housing crises’. Daniel is running for mayor to the completely upend City Hall’s broken system and that includes fearlessly calling out corruption in all its forms.”

The campign adds that the ads link to news that has already been widely circulated.

Lurie’s ads do not violate Google’s policies, and Google completely allows advertisers to alter displayed headlines on links. Google generally displays the word “Sponsored” next to the ad, but does not reveal that campaigns have reworded the headlines and preview text. And it is inconsistent in showing who paid for the ad.

And even presidential campaigns lately aren't above this shadiness.

Axios reported last week that Kamala Harris’s campaign is also altering news headlines on Google ads. And these ads may be more effective than most, as they display very similarly to normal search results. But casual web-surfers may not notice the tiny-text word “Sponsored,” and may come away believing that the Chronicle and SF Standard both ran articles declaring “Don’t Trust Mark Farrell.”

"Some of these news organizations might not want to be positioned as promoting one campaign, and this implies that they have a bias towards that campaign, potentially," John Gable, CEO of the media bias ratings firm AllSides, told Axios.

SFist has also reached out to the Farrell campaign for comment, and we will update this post with any response.

It sure stands out that Lurie is only going after Farrell with these ads, and not any of the other candidates in the mayoral race. And there had definitely been unusual animosity between these two wealthiest candidates in the race, as they often engage in public Twitter feuds with one another.

This certainly adds more interesting context to the story of the fake MarkFarrellForMayor.com website that some anonymous troll started for the purpose of trashing Farrell.

You can rip the Lurie campaign for doing this, but honestly, Google is really the party at fault for even allowing this. Heck, even Facebook put a halt to this practice on their platform way back in 2017, noting in a company blog post that “As part of our continuing efforts to stop the spread of misinformation and false news on Facebook.”

But with the Lurie campign massively outspending its opponents, they've bought the luxury of taking real news, and repackaging it as fake news, because Google simply allows political campaings to do so.

Note: This post has been updated with comment from the Daniel Lurie campaign.

Related: Someone Who Hates Mark Farrell Bought the ‘Mark Farrell for Mayor’ Website Just to Trash Him [SFist]

Images: (Left) Daniel Lurie for Mayor, (Right) @MarkFarrellSF

The "gig economy" is literally killing us.

Most depressing ad of the day goes to: @fiverr 🙃 pic.twitter.com/xq0sxsL55t

— it's B! Cavello ✊️ (@b_cavello) March 9, 2017

Hustlers and freelancers in the excitingly barbaric gig economy don't have time to look up at silly ad campaigns — but if they did, they'd be treated, at least in San Francisco BART stations and on Muni buses, to these cool posters valorizing the tragedy of our hopelessly fragmented economy.

For some time now, Fiverr, a "marketplace for freelancers," has been papering cities with increasingly dark ads for their services. Capitalizing on models with chic, urbane looks, the advertisements criticize "dreamers" in favor of "doers," which is basically to say "give up, forget about health care, and do some odd jobs you find online until you can legally sell your organs."

"Fiverr celebrates entrepreneurial spirit, and San Francisco's innovative environment makes perfect sense as the home for our newest office," Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman said in a press release that announced the opening of Fiverr's digs here last summer. The brand was in the news last month for its association with Youtube star PewDiePie, who used the service "to show how crazy the modern world is," by paying people to hold up irreverent signs, which included a perhaps unexpectedly antisemitic one, in one of his videos. That lost the star his deal with Disney and Google.

Meanwhile, the company's ads, and maybe the gig economy itself, are beginning to strike a dark chord, as New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino pointed out in a piece yesterday.

A press release for the ad campaign claims it "positions Fiverr to seize today’s emerging zeitgeist of entrepreneurial flexibility, rapid experimentation, and doing more with less. It pushes against bureaucratic overthinking, analysis-paralysis, and excessive whiteboarding.”

But Tolentino observes that "This is the jargon through which the essentially cannibalistic nature of the gig economy is dressed up as an aesthetic."

No one wants to eat coffee for lunch or go on a bender of sleep deprivation—or answer a call from a client while having sex, as recommended in the video. It’s a stretch to feel cheerful at all about the Fiverr marketplace, perusing the thousands of listings of people who will record any song, make any happy-birthday video, or design any book cover for five dollars.

Tolentino's critique begins by invoking an incident from last summer in which a Chicago Lyft driver, nine months pregnant, picked up riders on the way to the hospital, a move Lyft's PR department celebrated. “Since she didn’t believe she was going into labor yet,” Lyft wrote “she stayed in driver mode, and sure enough—ping!— she received a ride request en route to the hospital.”

Writes Tolentino, "Within the ghoulishly cheerful Lyft public-relations machinery, [the driver] is an exemplar of hard work and dedication—the latter being, perhaps, hard to come by in a company that refuses to classify its drivers as employees." But without the boosterism, the scene is simply sad. "The contrast between the gig economy’s rhetoric (everyone is always connecting, having fun, and killing it!) and the conditions that allow it to exist (a lack of dependable employment that pays a living wage) makes this kink in our thinking especially clear," Tolentino writes.

It's also a predicament that blurs the line between boosterism and parody. Consider a post this week on the Onion's website Clickhole:

"Gender Equality FTW! This Company Has Installed Stirrups On All Of Its Desks So Female Employees Can Give Birth Without Falling Behind On Their Work."

Related: YouTube Superstar PewDiePie Goes 'Too Far' With Anti-Semitic Stunt, Loses Deals With Disney And Google

It's a tale of two trailers, as Business Insider juxtaposes them. Both are for Straight Outta Compton, but one is for audiences presumed familiar with NWA and one is for audiences who presumably might know Dr. Dre or Ice Cube but little of their early years.

How did Facebook know which one to send you? Put another way, how does Facebook know your race, and then from there, how does it presume what you do and do not like or know?

The company may not ask you how you to identify in terms of race, but it does take pains to notice whether you are part of, say, an African American or perhaps a Native American affinity group on the site. Ars Technica explains that Facebook has used "ethnic affinity" targeting for a few years, and even points to a Facebook tutorial for how to use the feature for advertisers.

The diversity of the US is more than an ethnic biodiversity. These groups of people have a rich diversity of culture, which can include many things, such as beliefs, traditions, music, aesthetics, or language. The people in the US who have demonstrated affinity for the cultures of these groups make up the US Multicultural Affinity audiences.

The word “affinity” can generally be defined as a relationship like a marriage, as a natural liking, and as a similarity of characteristics. We are using the term “Multicultural Affinity” to describe the quality of people who are interested in and likely to respond well to multicultural content. What we are referring to in these affinity groups is not their genetic makeup, but their affinity to the cultures they are interested in.

The Facebook multicultural targeting solution is based on affinity, not ethnicity. This provides advertisers with an opportunity to serve highly relevant ad content to affinity-based audiences.

Doug Neil, who works at Universal and partnered with Facebook to customize their race-based marketing strategy for Straight Outta Compton, called the movie — and perhaps the advertising move along with it — "A breakout hit."

Related: Facebook Employees Keep Crossing Out 'Black Lives Matter' And Writing 'All Lives Matter' At Company HQ

Hey, guys, remember the halcyon days of January, 2000, when a bunch of dot com companies dropped scads of money on commercials that would run during the Super Bowl? One current-day dot com seems unwilling to wait until this year's big game, instead launching an ad campaign to run during the World Series. Will that strategy pay off better in 2015 than it did 15 years ago?

This time around, the commercial-buyer is Twitter, which had a hefty round of layoffs two weeks ago and yesterday announced slower-than-expected growth and lowered revenue predictions for next quarter. The ad, which ran during last night's World Series game, is part of an “integrated marketing campaign” that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced on Tuesday's earnings call. Here it is:

According to The Verge, the ad is entitled "Post-Season," and is intended "to let targeted segments of potential users see the stuff that's on Twitter every day." Which you'd think those folks might have already considered, but whatever!

The ad was created by TBWA\Chiat\Day, the ad agency that, according to Ad Week, created those Airbnb ads we all liked so much! (You know the ones I'm talking about.) So, I guess, it sure could be worse?

That same agency was also behind Apple's ground-breaking "1984" ad, which aired during that year's Super Bowl, thus bringing us back to Super Bowl XXXIV. I had forgotten that the St. Louis Rams battled the Tennessee Titans in the 2000 game, but I sure did remember that during the event, 19 online startups bought ads, and eight of those crashed and burned shortly thereafter. (Guess who made one of that game's most infamous ads, for Pets.com? TBWA\Chiat\Day, again! They're the Forrest Gump of tech advertising!)

Of course, the World Series isn't the Super Bowl, and their ad rates prove it: According to Advertising Age, "the going rate for a 30-second commercial in the World Series is around $545,000 a pop." Compare that to the $5 million-for-30-seconds Forbes reports Super Bowl 50 will ask, and a World Series ad seems like a bargain. (In case you're curious, rates for ads that play during the broadcast of high-rated comedy or drama series vary greatly, from $155,727 for a spot during The Simpsons to $521,794 during Empire, reports Variety.)

Though Twitter ran a TV ad during a NASCAR event in 2012, that was a one-off, making this the company's first full-on TV campaign. Though Twitter declined to tell The Verge how much they'd spent on the ad, they did say that they expect them to air "regularly in prime time," giving us all something new through which to fast-forward.

Previously: Twitter Stock Takes Another Dip After Earnings Call, And Square's Numbers Aren't Great Either

In honor of tomorrow's SF Artisan Fragrance Salon—as well as Barbara Herman, author of Scent and Subversion: Decoding a Century of Provocative Perfume and vintage perfume blogger at YesterdaysPerfume.com, and her upcoming SF appearance—I came across a gaggle of perfume ads that require your immediate attention. (One in particular, so horrific, we tacked it on the end to show you how far we've come. Brace yourselves.)

10. Dune by Dior (1991)
Dune arrived in the early '90s soon after Poison's bombastic domination of the '80s. If you've never enjoyed Dune, you really should. It's a bizarre but beautiful scent. ("Unsmiling from top to bottom...drained of life, flesh-toned in the creepy way of artificial limbs, not real ones," is how Luca Turin deliriously describes the five-star fragrance in Perfumes: the A-Z Guide) The ads for the (now-rare) scent, though, are so simple and so European. The perfect palate cleanser.

9. Coty Wild Musk (1983)
So bad it's bad, this ad for Coty Wild Musk proved why cocaine was a helluva drug in the '80s.

8. Opium by YSL (1986)
Linda Evangelista can do no wrong, even while appearing in an inadvertently pro-sex slavery ad for YSL's Opium. Fabulous. (The campaign, however, was not without controversy: this particular ad, featuring a jonesing Evangelista on a drug run, offended the American-Chinese community and was banned in Australia. Classic Linda.)

7. Gio by Armani (1992)
Awful fragrance (which continued the trend of bad water scents, ones that continue to dominate your Marina boyfriend's chest), but this as was directed by David Lynch (during his Madonna days) and, of course, means it deserves a place on the list.

6. Rive Gauche by YSL (1979)
While '70s end with "the girl so contemporary, she's having too much fun to marry..."

5. Beautiful by Estee Lauder (1980)
...and the '80s begin with her staunch white wedding.

4. White Diamonds (1987)
"These have always brought me luck." Indeed. The fragrance—one of the first celebrity fragrances, for better or for worse (but mainly worse)—was a smash hit.

3. Chanel No. 5 (1978)
"This unexpectedly poignant Chanel No. 5 commercial hints at something kind of radical: that perfume might in fact be a personal, private, aesthetic experience for women," Barbara Herman notes on YesterdaysPerfume.com. "This flies in the face of the majority of perfume ads that suggest that perfume is created to help women drive men wild...I'd say that Deneuve's description of her relationship to perfume is what comes closest to how niche perfume lovers experience scents. " (The same could be said for some men too!)

2. Compulsion by Calvin Clean: SNL's parody of Calvin Klein's Obsession
Wonderful sendup of this famous excessively arty ad.

1. Kazumi Kurigami's Parco
Required viewing for all human beings. In a word, genius. In five words, Faye Dunaway eating an egg.

SHAME: Love's Baby Soft (1975)
Trigger warning: Love's Baby Soft's ad is downright disgusting and frightening. View at your own peril. Appalling.

Thanks goes out to Barbara Herman for her inspiring work on YesterdaysPerfume.com. You can hear Herman read at Opera Plaza Books, Inc. on March 27. And be sure to check out the SF Artisan Fragrance Salon happening this Saturday at Fort Mason.

Twitter is racing — racing! — to bring more video advertising to the site. The San Francisco-based company is reportedly in talks with NBC and Viacom to add even more TV content to your favorite social media platform.

Bloomberg reports:

Twitter ... is racing to add video content that will get users to spend more time on the site and watch promotions. Building on its existing partnerships with Walt Disney Co. (DIS)’s ESPN, Weather Channel LLC and Turner Broadcasting System Inc. (TWX), Twitter is seeking to add more entertainment and news video, two people familiar with the plan said. NBC, which also owns the USA Network, and Viacom, which owns MTV and Nickelodeon, would make attractive partners given the popularity of their content.

This partnership, it seems, would then allow Twitter to stream videos and then split the ad revenue with the network. Here's an example of what it would look like, via the following highlight clip, embedded in a Tweet from the NCAA March Madness tournament. Behold:

An ad within an ad, basically.

But why work with Twitter on posting ad content rather than a TV network doing it themselves? According to All Things D, it would be best for networks to work with Twitter, saying:

Their argument, according to people who have heard the pitch, is that Twitter can figure out how to display the networks’ content in front of Twitter users who might not know about their channels/shows, but might be inclined to like them if they did.

Twitter (unlike successful yet long-in-the-tooth Facebook) goes together with television the way peanut butter goes together with chocolate. It just works. Bloomberg goes on to report:

Last June, a third of active Twitter users posted on the site about something they watched on TV, up from 26 percent at the beginning of the year, Nielsen Holdings NV (NLSN) said in a report on social media last year. Twitter and Nielsen have agreed to form a partnership to measure the amount of online discussion being generated by TV programs.

FWIW, Twitter, for many of us, have helped bring a much-needed return to live TV viewing. Watching a show in realtime while perusing Twitter — particularly while watching reality programming like #BGC12 or #RHOA — have added an exciting live element to TV sorely lacking in these modern DVR times.

[Bloomberg]
[All Things D]

You recall the fake rape report that went down in February at UC Santa Cruz, right? Well, the suspect in question, oddly described by NY Daily News as a "visiting brunette" from UC Santa Barbara, allegedly posted several Craigslist ads seeking physical abuse in exchange for sex prior to the rape report.

Morgan Triplett, 20, allegedly published two ads, one asking to be "shot in the shoulder with a small caliber gun" and then another requesting for a man to "punch, kick and bruise her." According to the Register Pajaronian, "Triplett’s story raised eyebrows at the hospital when she requested that DNA samples of the sex assault not be taken."

She pled not guilty in court on Friday.

Morgan Triplett's father, Richard, defended his daughter after her court appearance, saying, "She is sorry for any problems or chaos that she has caused ... What we're dealing with is a very scared, very upset, very confused 20-year-old girl who has made some poor choices. This is the culmination of those choices."

The co-ed told police she was beaten and raped while walking along a wooded area on the UCSC campus during a Sunday afternoon. Morgan was visiting the UC campus for a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender conference. If found guilty of making a false report, she could face up to six months in jail. She pled not guilty

New ads adorning ten of the city's buses are causing a stir for their anti-Islamic rhetoric and sparking a hate speech vs. free speech debate that's got Muni parked in the crossfire.

The ads feature quotes from Osama bin Laden, Hamas TV and Times Square jihad car bomber Faisal Shahzad and others, followed by the tagline "That's his Jihad. What's yours?". "Killing Jews is worship that draws us closer to Allah" one reads, while another quotes Osama bin Laden: "The first thing we are calling you to is Islam." The ads are a rebuttal to visually similar ads sponsored by the Council on American Islamic Relations that ran on Muni buses earlier this year. That campaign was aimed at reclaiming the word "jihad" from the violence and terrorism that many people associate it with.

D.A. George Gascon held a press conference denouncing the new ads as hate speech, even quoting Edmund Burke, "The only thing necessary for evil to prevail is for good people to look the other way and do nothing."

You may remember the group behind the ads, American Freedom Defense Initiative, from last summer's similar anti-Jihad ads. They've issued a statement by AFDI Executive Director Pamela Geller denouncing backlash over the ads:

"Americans need to understand the threat they're facing. That is the point of our ads. The slaughter of Christians in Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Malaysia, Algeria et al -- that doesn't warrant a statement, let alone a press conference from San Francisco authorities, but my ads do. Think about that. Hundreds of thousands dead, but it would be blasphemy to talk about. The slaughter in the cause of jihad is OK, but my talking about it is the problem."

Muni spokesman Paul Rose told CBS that the agency will be giving the $5,000 revenue from the ads to the Humans Rights Commission "to help support and encourage tolerance."

Meanwhile, AFDI has a Indiegogo "Jihad Awareness Campaign" that has thus-far raised $1,255 of its $50,000 goal.

[KPIX]

Further proof that the Mission needs an abortion: this Craigslist ad seeks a roommate to pay a whopping $1,000 for an 80-square-foot room inside an apartment with four other "grown-ass men" working in tech. It's also got a "solid kitchen" and a "pretty sweet view."

Behold:

$1000 / 80ft² - Sweet spot at 16th and Mission! (mission district)

Hey new roommate (well, probably not, but for one of you, this is true),

My roommates and I have a room available to rent at 16th and Dolores. We are looking for someone to move in as soon as possible - our current roommate just snagged a really awesome place right near by and is looking to move soon.

About us: We are 4 grown-ass men, 26-29, with jobs mainly in tech. We are good friends with active social lives. Sometimes we have friends over on the weekends. We go to Burning Man together. We have lots of bicycles. Life is fun. We are generally easy going. We spend a few nights a week around the apartment, the rest of them out and about (together or separately).

About the apartment: As you may have inferred, it is a 5-bedroom apartment. We have a solid kitchen, a nice-sized living room and 2.5 baths. We live on the 3rd floor and have roof access (which we occasionally use...pretty sweet view). Our neighbors are totally cool to live with - no issues.

About the room: The room is about 8x10 with a closet and a lofted bed (i.e. there is an underbed area and above that a structure such that the bed is about 4.5 feet above the floor). There is a decent-enough sized closet and some closet space in the hallway which you can use, as well. It's pretty sweet, as long as you don't need a really big space.

Rent is $1,000 a month and you will need to give us a 1-month security deposit to replace the outgoing roomie. We are flexible on how long you will want to live here from anywhere around 3 months up to 1 year.

Please send us a brief description of yourself and a note about why you think you would get along well with us. Also, please put "HEY DUDES" in your subject line so that we know you read the full post.

No sketchballs, no assholes, no neat freaks, no pets (though we are all animal lovers).

It's a master lease holder's world. We're just living in it.

Not sure if this is parody or not (we're leaning toward the former, obviously), but we a) love avocados and b) love anything involving a massive bottle of Squirt. And with that, we give your Zaddie, a mighty fine and mighty rare avocado that can be yours for only $10. But beware. Much like adopting from the SPCA, the avocado's current owner will call you from time to time to see how you're bonding with the prized fruit.

According to the Craigslist ad:

I recently found this beautiful Zutano avocado in my Zutano avocado tree. It's just about ripe. Has no bruises or marks.
It's humongous and looks really delicious...my avocados are always perfectly tender and full of amazing flavor.
Something inside me told me to share these delicious fruits (yes...it's a fruit) but not for fame or money but for the satisfied feeling you get when you do something beautiful. However I let no one touch my avocados! That is why it's extremely rare that I'm actually going to sell one today.
Whoever buys this one is taking a part of me; he/she should reflect on that. It's like taking a part of the frame from the Mona Lisa!
If that's not an excellent example for you to realize what your getting into than forget it, this avocado is not for you!!
Please treat her with care. Her name is Zaddie. I will call you and or message you from time to time to see how much your bond has grown with her.

Today's print edition of The Chronicle features a story about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, sentenced to life in prison for attempting to bomb a Northwest Airlines plane on Christmas Day 2009 with explosives tucked inside his underwear, gets fittingly formatted next to an ad for Macy's underwear. Page A5. Oops.

Earlier this month, we brought your attention to local ad agency Palmer Advertising's Craigslist ad. The advertisement seeking a print/web designer caused a stir since it mentioned that, however humorously intended, those diagnosed with bipolar disorder need not apply. It specifically stated, "The successful candidate will have ... Sanity. If you are a prima donna, bipolar, or require anger management, please go to a big agency where you can hide in the crowd."

However tongue-and-cheekily it meant to come off to potential candidates, it was not cool—especially when it comes to ADA laws and mental heath. But now the owner of said agency, Drew Palmer, has made remarkable amends.

First off, he made the following comment on SFist, apologizing for the remark.

This is Drew Palmer of Palmer Advertising. Your blog post was brought to my attention this morning. I am writing to sincerely apologize for the bullet point in the ad posted by Palmer. I certainly did not mean to offend anyone and the ad should not have been written and posted in this manner. Palmer does not discriminate against any one person for having disabilities and recognizes state laws regarding this subject. As soon as I read your sent email, the line was immediately deleted from the posting because you brought to my attention how people may take this, and it was wrong to write it. I hope all your readers can accept my apology.

Sincerely, Drew Palmer

Pretty cool. He could've lost his cool or, worse, been an outright dick about our post. He wasn't. Stand-up attitude, folks. Also of note? Chrisa Hickey, mental health blogger and parent of a teen with schizophrenia, wrote to SFist, saying:

When I heard about the Palmer Advertising Craigslist ad, I emailed Drew Palmer, owner of Palmer Advertising. We had a good email conversation - he seems very genuinely upset that this happened, and wants to make it right. When he asked me how he could, I suggested he reach out to NAMI San Francisco and offer his services in marketing and advertising, free of charge.

He instantly agreed and has reached out to their Executive Director. He wants to turn this negative into a positive.

I posted on my blog about our interaction, and I thought, you being local (I am from the Bay Area, but now reside in Chicago), you could help him connect to NAMI SF and be sure this comes to pass. I'm sure it will, if the right connection could be made, but it could use some coaxing!

Read all about Hickey's interaction here. (And, please, don't shun Palmer Advertising; they've done the right thing.)

A friendly reminder that, according to ADA laws, discriminating against a candidate or employee based on their mental health is illegal. Which is why, however tongue-in-cheek, San Francisco-based ad agency Palmer Advertising's Craigslist ad for a designer is cause for concern. In part of their requirements for the open Print & Web Designer gig, they note: "The successful candidate will have ... Sanity. If you are a prima donna, bipolar, or require anger management, please go to a big agency where you can hide in the crowd."

What does the ADA have to say about eschewing bipolars in the workplace? The National Alliance on Mental Illness has more:

The ADA requires employers who provide "reasonable accommodations" for qualified individuals with disabilities. What are "reasonable accommodations" for people with severe mental illness?

Examples of reasonable accommodations for people with severe mental illnesses included providing self-paced workloads and flexible hours, modifying job responsibilities, allowing leave (paid or unpaid) during periods of hospitalization or incapacity, assigning a supportive and understanding supervisor, modifying work hours to allow people to attend appointments with their psychiatrist, providing easy access to supervision and supports in the workplace, and providing frequent guidance and feedback about job performance.

Further, California employment law dictates:

The FEHA is the principal California statute prohibiting employment discrimination covering employers, labor organizations, employment agencies, apprenticeship programs and any person or entity who aids, abets, incites, compels, or coerces the doing of a discriminatory act. It prohibits employment discrimination based on race or color; religion; national origin or ancestry, physical disability; mental disability or medical condition.

In an ironic twist, the ad agency in question boasts the following client base: Health & Medicine, CalCPA ProtectPlus, Conquest Imaging, Doctors Medical Center, Hana Biosciences, San Joaquin General Hospital, Sutter Tracy Community Hospital, and—get this—the United States Postal Service.

Look, we get it. The agency took a stab, if you will, at humor. Or something resembling humor. Palmer doesn't want any loose-cannon, ego-driven jerks applying for the job. Makes sense. But bipolar disorder is a very serious (and very treatable!) mental illness, and an offhand comment like that was, at best, careless. At worst, cruel. Some of the finest, most talented people we personally know live with it—successfully so. You would have to be crazy to shun a pal, a colleague, or a qualified candidate living with bipolarism.

Update: As commenter Justin Alan Ryan points out, an agency with fewer than 15 people are not subject to the ADA. But they are subject to California Employment Law, which "prohibits employment discrimination based on race or color; religion; national origin or ancestry, physical disability; mental disability or medical condition."